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Thursday, 29 March 2018

The
election of Donald Trump prompted a number of people, including historians, to
make comparisons of Trump’s cult of personality with various historical figures
from Benito Mussolini to Roman Emperor Caligula (37-41 A.D.) While such
comparison’s make for entertaining reading, they place all emphasis on the
individual rather than the system that permitted the individual to rise to
power. Hardly an alien from outer space or an immigrant from a distant land, Trump
is a product of late 20th century American culture immersed in
contradictions that manifest themselves in all domains from the ideological and
political arena to the multifaceted socio-cultural landscape that make up the
layers of society. Rooted in individualism, the value system makes it easy for
the masses to reject the concept of the system creating the environment for a
Caligula culture while focusing on Caligula as the culprit for all that ails
society, while preserving the system. Refraining from castigating the Caligula
culture and promoting political leadership to obfuscate it permits the elites
to preserve a system that serves their interests without the stigma of a
Caligula in charge diluting a much-needed popular legitimacy.

The
persistence of demonizing the individual leader and obsessing with the cult of
personality is itself not only a distraction from the reality of the structural
order that propelled Trump to power, but in fact a reactionary response to the
anachronistic political, social, and cultural milieu slowly rotting away and
permitting the worst among society’s elites to undermine society and hastening the
downward mobility of the working class. In this respect, there is no comparison
with Caligula because the nascent Roman Empire easily withstood Caligula and
thrived for another two centuries before the long road to decline following the
death of Marcus Aurelius (180 A.D.), the last of the ‘Five Good Emperors’. The
US is already in a ‘post-Marcus Aurelius empire phase’ of a long decline and
the Caligula culture is both symptomatic of that reality and a precursor of
worse things to come.

The
signs are everywhere, most notably in a declining parasitic economy based on ‘financialization’
(transfer income from the real economy to speculative markets) and the strengthening
of a militarized police state structure financed by incurring larger public
debt. In no small measure, the US as the world’s second largest economy to
China’s in terms of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) and declining rapidly under
neoliberal policies that massively concentrate capital in the top one percent
has precipitated the Caligula culture of chaos and authoritarian populism. Unwilling
to undergo systemic change to slow down the inevitable decline, the financial elites
whose interests the political class serves is caught between even greater support
for a Caligula culture or superficial attempts to conceal it as a stigma that
erodes legitimacy to govern under an authoritarian model. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/peri_workingpapers/135/;https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-10-18/who-has-the-world-s-no-1-economy-not-the-u-s

It is hardly a secret that Trump
openly embracing authoritarianism shocks many people not only among the masses deluding
themselves about equality and democracy, but especially the elites needing a
facade of a ‘democracy’ to operate over a capitalist world order with a cloak
of legitimacy. Capitalists and their apologists need a neat and convincing cover
of popular legitimacy. By exposing the ugly reality of authoritarianism serving
the wealthy while treating the rest of the population with disdain as public
policy proves, policy that benefit the elites as a class regardless of whether
they embrace or castigate the Caligula culture, Trump has suddenly lifted the
cloak of democracy. Beneath the very thin surface of a liberal democracy
presenting itself as theoretically egalitarian and just for all people there
was always a Caligula culture but without a Caligula like Trump to boldly
embrace it while demonstrating contempt for democratic institutions serving as
the thin veil of popular legitimacy. Just as many among the Roman masses loved
that Caligula attacked the Senate and the patrician class while the Roman
system served their interests, similarly a segment of the American masses love
that Trump attacks the liberal elites despite the fact that his policies serve
the same establishment elite.

Years
before Trump emerged in the political arena too busy with real estate and reality
TV, Cintra Wilson’s satirical book “Caligula for President: Better American Living Through
Tyranny”captured the spirit of America’s Caligula
culture belittling the idea that America’s leaders not only embrace tyranny at
home and abroad, but they boast about it as a badge of honor for society. Not
only is America’s Caligula culture apologetic about exploiting its own masses,
invading countries around the world, it makes the victims feel that they
deserve such treatment and it is their fault they have fallen victims to the
Caligula culture. ‘Hyper-legality’, a form of authoritarianism as the executive
rules by decree (executive order in the US), along with the ascendancy of the
corporate welfare state and simultaneous decline of the social welfare state
substituting the latter with liberal identity politics that further breaks
class solidarity, the American hegemonic culture has so indoctrinated the popular
culture of the broader masses that they believe only in alternatives within the
same Caligula culture of lesser evils.

Even consent theory based on John Locke’s classical
philosophy of Liberalism has no place in the Caligula culture of neoliberalism
that is more comfortable with authoritarianism as a regime regimenting the
social order. The crisis of America’s decline as a world power against the rise
of China has diluted if not obviated policy-formation and consent-theory, as we
knew it under Pax Americana throughout the Cold War and produced the Caligula
culture, itself a distraction from the underlying causes of systemic crisis. Given
that the political and financial elites have always manufactured consent,
consent-theory is their domain to define and implement to preserve and advance
their privileged position. Crises, however, bring out in otherwise
docile-conformist citizens tendencies that range from reactionary to
revolutionary, from cynicism to “apocalyptic nihilism,” which is what most
people act on and understand by the term (as opposed to anarchist or
existential). Against this systemic backdrop, the Caligula culture has a face
to go with it, namely Trump eager to build a cult of personality and
unashamedly celebrate America’s Caligula culture instead of hiding behind a
liberal façade like his predecessors. (Michael Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent,
1979; Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent, 2002)

Besides resorting to more austere laws to “contain”
dissidence as it arises amid greater socioeconomic problems in a polarized
society, the state along with the media, think tanks, and those with access and
influence to public opinion, the Caligula culture promotes the pluralist-identity
politics option that ostensibly presents itself as ‘the democratic alternative’;
as proof that citizens have a choice of ruling styles and rulers. Meanwhile,
public policy remains essentially in the service of the same elites responsible
for the rise of the Caligula culture and values. It shocks some people to
discover that Caligula culture places greater value in garbage as a marketable
commodity more than in people, social justice, the environment and life if it
interferes with capital accumulation. Beguiling rationalizations aside, the
vacuous rhetoric about moral principles of “equality of opportunity” and
meritocracy in theory, the record shows that the Caligula culture is just as
hostile toward humanity today as it was during Caligula’s reign.

The success of modern America’s elites rests with the
brilliant manipulation of public opinion to the degree that a segment of the
population has embraced the Caligula culture as the norm, not just
conservatives and religious fundamentalists, but liberals as well who want to
preserve the system as long s it is well-concealed behind a nicely-wrapped toga
of institutional pluralism that translates into co-optation of diverse elements
into the ranks of the elites. The contradictions between the liberal illusion’s
promise and what it fails to deliver is precisely why America’s Caligula
culture has become sufficiently prominent to elect its rightful Caligula in Trump.

A product of the early Cold War, Daniel Boorstin’s A
Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961) argued that: “America was living in an ‘age of contrivance,’ in which illusions and
fabrications had become a dominant force in society. Public life is filled with
‘pseudo-events’–staged and scripted events that were a kind of counterfeit
version of actual happenings.” Seven decades later in the age of “FAKE NEWS”
and the substitution of news broadcasts with propaganda, the Caligula culture has
reduced relativism to the level of confusing people so they are led to believe
policies detrimental to their interests are actually ‘good’ for them because
they are good for the ‘national interest’ as the elites define it for the rest
of society.

As the world’s center of the market economy that has
created a Caligula culture, the US created a “hyperreality” (the world of the
absolute fake) as Umberto Eco labeled it. As traits of success, hollowness and
superficiality over substance are not only confided to the domain of politics whether
it is with right-wing Tea Party Republican of Sarah Palin that laid the
groundwork for Caligula-Trump, French (Gucci) Socialists embracing neoliberal
policies that strengthen Marine Le Pen’s neo-Fascist National Front, or British
Labour parading reformers while hardly distinguishable from their Tory
counterparts when it comes to public policy. To maintain the Caligula culture,
society needs the entire superstructure supporting it and it has it. From educational
institutions that have assumed the business management model to government and
non-profit organizations, hollowness and superficiality have deep historical
roots that reflect societal values and institutional structures that create and
replicate such personality archetypes destined to float to the top largely by
the incredible lightness of being that make the Caligula culture possible.

Considering the anti-intellectualism of the Caligula
culture, the ceaseless attack on the rationalism of the Enlightenment as the intellectual
foundation of the Western World, hollowness and superficiality over substance
reflects the reality that the mass media inculcate into human beings, a reality
that in turn people internalize to cope with life in all its phases from
euphoric to tragic as they see no alternative to institutional conformity. Long
before Donald Trump, America’s Caligula culture was the outgrowth of a decadent
social order finding itself in myriads of contradictions rooted in its goal to
amass greater wealth globally while operating within the nation-state confines
where the issue of national sovereignty and popular sovereignty become
intertwined.

If the media molds the pubic with images so immersed
in illusions about a façade of democracy and an alternative to the Caligula
culture simply by removing Caligula and not the decadent system that made
Caligula possible and brought him to power to serve the elites, what hope is
there for systemic change in society intended to benefit all as democracy promises?
Until the illusion of choice itself is confronted by the reality that peoples’ lives
are not improving and that the system continues to operate in blatant
inconsistencies and contradictions between what the corporate world and
political elites are promising, on the one hand, and the empirical experiences
of peoples’ lives, on the other, societal change rooted in humane values cannot
take place. (Andrew Bard Schmookler,The Illusion of Choice: How
the Market Economy Shapes Our Destiny, 1992)

"A
gripping, passion-filled, and suspenseful tale of love, betrayal,
political and religious intrigue, this novel entices the reader’s
senses and intellect beyond conventions. Slaves to Gods and Demons
takes the reader through a roller coaster enthralling journey of
personal trials and triumphs of a family emerging vanquished and
destitute after World War II.

Narrated by a young boy, Morfeos, modeled after the Greco-Roman pagan
deity of sleep and dreams, the book reveals the soul of a people trying
to ascertain and assert their identity while rebuilding their lives and
recapturing the glory of a lost civilization.

Seeking liberation from restraints of time, social conventions, and
binding traditions, the deity of dreams provides the conformist and the
free-spirited characters in the novel with venues for redemption that
are mere paths toward illusions. Exploring the complexities of human
relationships shaped by priest and politician alike, the novel rests on
the central theme that life is invariably a series of illusions, some
of which are euphoric, most horrifying, all an integral part of daily
existence.

Striving for purpose amid life’s absurdities after the destruction of
western civilization in two global wars, the characters in Slaves to
Gods and Demons struggle between holding on to the glory and grandeur of
a pagan legacy and the Christian present shaped by contemporary
secular events in Western Civilization."